[OT] Copyright infringement, sometimes a good way to do guerilla marketing :o)

[Martin Baxter]

J. Landman Gay wrote:
> Malte Brill wrote:
>> Hi list,
>>
>> this an absolutely off topic post...
>>
>> I was reading my serverlogs yesterday night an have been a little
>> puzzled of why a relevant amount of Traffic comes from youTube. Until
>> now I was using youTube only passively. Looking at the detailed log
>> revealed that some kid in the US has 'borrowed' the logo of one of my
>> games to display as his background image. Not he did only use it
>> without asking, but he also linked it directly from my server. 
> 
> My Control Panel at my web site's ISP (jaguarpc.com) has a utility to
> prevent this kind of linking. I'm not exactly sure how it works but I
> think it writes to the .htaccess file at the root level of my domain
> account.
> 

Do a search for "hotlinking htaccess" that should get you started.

You can forbid access unless the request comes from a link in your own
(or other named) site. You can also return a substitute file. You can
choose specific file extensions for it to operate on. Some people return
rude or unsatisfactory images. Some regex knowledge is useful.

At one time I was losing a lot of bandwidth on some image-heavy sites to
"myspace kiddies", forum posters and the like. Course it depends if you
have bandwidth to spare and whether you host the kind of media files
people can't keep their sticky fingers off.

In some cases though I have photoshoppped a url into the image and
deliberately allowed this to happen in the hope of getting some traffic.

Martin Baxter

-- 
I am Not a Number, I am a free NaN